Be Kind
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Be Kind
1–10 of 401 posts
Re: Be Kind
#2Spot on. I think it's tough, particularly as a young guy, to hold back on being overly confrontational. I used to be horrible to be around, not just professionally, but in nearly every way. Super fighty and abrasive.
I'd like to think that it was through mindful practice that I've managed to tame my aggression. Perhaps it is, partly. But the real reason that I'm a lot easier to get along with now probably has to do with aging out of the testosterone-flooded decade of my 20s.
Re: Be Kind
#3While the author may have been a very talented engineer, there are also a lot of mediocre engineers (and members of other professions) who happen to act like jerks.
Don't assume that just because someone is crotchety, indignant, or combative that he/she is intelligent.
Re: Be Kind
#4I really like these two paragraphs towards the end:
Being kind isn’t the same as being nice. It isn’t about superficial praise.
It doesn’t mean dulling your opinions. And it shouldn’t diminish the passion
with which you present them.
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on
the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and
considerate of the way your presence affects them.
It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone. Remember that others often shut-down when they read criticism, even when well warranted. The way you phrase and present yourself defines whether you're giving criticism or critique.
Re: Be Kind
#5People seem to underestimate this but I've learned this lesson myself the hard way. Your absolute most important skill is not to make a dick of yourself next to your co-workers. Even if it means doing things wrong for a while, it is essential you don't hurt feelings while slowly pushing for things to change.
Re: Be Kind
#6"Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them."
I think this advice is so apt and so needed. There's a perception that to be effective or powerful, one must also be harsh, stern, a little bit mean. That stems from a misunderstanding of what kindness is. Hopefully people will heed his advice!
Re: Be Kind
#7This guy has a 3 letter domain for his personal blog. How did he land that?
Re: Be Kind
#8The author is self aware and empathetic. But even if he wasn't or his natural inclination was not to become more kind, it's a really good thing to fake (and will hopefully become natural over time). Being kind is the right thing to do even if you're selfish/looking out only for yourself. A lot of really smart jerks are held back because other people don't want to work with them. Even if they're promoted for their individual contributions, they will always be limited by how much they individually can achieve vs. as a team.
Re: Be Kind
#9I really like these two paragraphs towards the end: Being kind isn’t the same as being nice. It isn’t about superficial praise. It doesn’t mean dulling your opinions. And it shouldn’t diminish the passion with which you present them. Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence af…
To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting. Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best and constant worrying about how they will take something is just way too much BS to put into my day. I bought pretty deeply into this philosophy once and it just made me neurotic and quiet at a time of my life where those things very much hurt me.
I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.
I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.
I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.
Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.
Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.
Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if we're buying into cheap manufactured sentiment that just happens to be self-complimentary, I'd say we're fairly far from that ideal. The same way we point at the nasty evangelicals will hearts full of hate who pat each other on the back for being so pious. Lets not go that route, as tempting as it is. All the technology is showing you this message was made by sweatshop-style labor. We're just not kind.
Re: Be Kind
#10This guy has a 3 letter domain for his personal blog. How did he land that?
WHOIS shows this:
Registered On February 08, 1999
I guess availability was better then, or he made some good cash in the .dot era and bought it outright from someone else?